Possible bottleneck?

I've recently upgrading my graphics card to a Radeon EAH6850 DirectCU, as I thought why not at Ł89. I'm noticing a bit of a framerate issue on The Witcher 2. I'm aware that The Witcher 2 is pretty intense and I have everything set to med 1280 x 1024.

I currently have a Q6600, so I'm wondering whether there's a bottleneck issue? or maybe I need to adjust a few settings to get a sweet spot?

The Gfx card could be your issue. The Witcher 2 is a vicious game and your card is a slightly tweaked 5840, as far as gaming is concerned. In other words you're using a bottom end mid range card which is pushing 5 years old.

If the temps are ok, you can probably get that Q6600 up to 3.2GHz (by increasing the FSB frequency). Do it in stages, and keep an eye on the CPU temperature. There are loads of tutorials on how to overclock the Q6600, so read a few before doing anything.

Khanivor wrote:
The Gfx card could be your issue. The Witcher 2 is a vicious game and your card is a slightly tweaked 5840, as far as gaming is concerned. In other words you're using a bottom end mid range card which is pushing 5 years old.

The 6850 is less that two years old. Ignore the rest of this advice ^

At the res the OP is running at and the fact the medium settings are being used the bottleneck is almost certainly the CPU. Overclock to 3Ghz if you can get it to that. Presumably the stock hsf is being used but still try the oc.

I have Witcher 2 running on a Core2Duo (8200 OCed slightly) and a HD6870 (P5Q, Vista 32, 4GB PC2-6400). I had to disable a bunch of settings to get it running smooth at 1920x1080. On full settings I get a ton of input lag and framerates in the 10s.

You don't really notice the difference at that resolution anyway. The majority of the game's artwork is good enough that prettifying it would be pointless. It's only in the areas that the art isn't so good that the bells and whistles would actually make a difference. Even plumping for the largest texture size is pointless, you rarely get the camera close enough to a surface.

Rather than fiddle endlessly, I hit the auto-detect and then turned down the AA to 2x, dynamic shadows to the lowest while turning on/up the stuff that makes a bigger visual impact, like ambient occlusion, DOF, HDR, and texture quality. Runs from good to great framerates depending on the scene. Dynamic shadows are the real killer, it really seems to hammer the system bus when using a Radeon HD, nVidia cards are reportedly better with it.

Just thought I'd let you guys know that I appear to have fixed the issue. The stuttering or dodgy framerate was fixed by putting a few files I downloaded off another forum into the bin folder. It's really improved performance and I'm quite happy